What is news is the silence around last month’s 2013 Human Rights Watch report claiming that the human rights situation in the United Arab Emirates (of which Abu Dhabi is a city-state) “deteriorated rapidly” in 2012.

So far, none of the bastions of Western tolerance have had much to say about that, or, for that matter, the previous annual reports detailing how laborers in the UAE are indentured servants, women have barely more rights than farm animals and political dissent leads directly to jail, sometimes by way of torture.

The details are disturbing.

Women’s rights are basically nonexistent. Like many Islamic nations, the UAE applies Shariah law to women, meaning that women cannot seek adjudication pursuant to a civil code. Rape victims rarely seek justice, and if they do, they are prosecuted themselves. In December, a 28-year-old British woman who claimed she was gang raped by three men in Dubai (another UAE city-state) was prosecuted for drinking without a license. The Supreme Court has upheld men’s right to beat their wives and children. Emirati women can only obtain a divorce through khul’a, a no-fault divorce that requires them to forfeit all financial rights. Emirati females are legally allowed to inherit just one-third of assets while men are entitled to inherit two-thirds. Men, but not women, are allowed to have four spouses. Men can marry non-Muslims; women cannot.

Two prominent human rights lawyers, Mohammed al-Roken and Mohammed al-Mansoori, have been detained for several years, along with judges, teachers and student leaders. Islamist activists simply disappear in detention. Last year, authorities issued a new federal decree on cyber-crime, making it a jailable offense to caricature or criticize the government. In 2011, a lecturer in economics at the Abu Dhabi University of Paris-Sorbonne (also lured to Happiness Island) was arrested for criticizing the government.

Nearly 90 percent of UAE residents are foreigners with limited rights. Many are Bangladeshi immigrant laborers who must work off the fees they are charged to get hired, have no right to organize or bargain collectively and face penalties for going on strike. Worker suicide rates are high.

This milieu would not seem to be the ideal home away from home for professors who teach labor history and gender studies.

But the price was right.

It’s unclear just how much Emirati money flooded Washington Square. Abu Dhabi gave NYU $50 million in the ’00s, but that was only the public, first tender offer. In 2008, Mariët Westermann, the former director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, appointed the first vice chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) said, “Abu Dhabi is willing to invest in whatever is needed on the Square. They are very committed to the flow.”

NYUAD spokesman Josh Taylor declined to put a figure on the total contributed for The Observer but, referring to the new HRW report, he said: “NYUAD is committed to an environment that ensures academic freedom, thereby providing a context in which students, faculty and staff can engage in the intellectual exploration and analysis of even the most sensitive issues. However, such freedom does not extend to tolerating speech, writing and/or behavior that intentionally demeans others based on gender, race, religion, national origin, disability, and/or sexual orientation. It also does not extend to public defamation, libel or slander. Such behavior runs counter to NYUAD’s educational mission.”

Regarding women’s rights, he emailed us a Tumblr link with several dozen snapshots of NYUAD students holding small signs starting with “Feminism is important because ...”

He said that gender studies is not one of the degrees offered at the Happiness Island campus, but women are not subject to the dress code that prevails beyond its walls.

NYU’s president, legal scholar John Sexton (who cut the Abu Dhabi deal and has earned the nickname “the George Steinbrenner of academia” for his fund-raising and grand vision), is teaching a course in religion and government at Abu Dhabi and commutes between New York and the UAE. About a third of the NYUAD staff consists of New York-based faculty members who fly over (first class) to teach on a monthly basis.

A 2008 New York magazine story on NYUAD revealed off-the-record professorial angst over the collaboration, but faculty members have been mostly silent. It’s a rare voice on the left—especially in the academies—who will take on Islamist censorship and Shariah abuses against women.

This is all the more disturbing since at NYUAD, at least, the chill seems to be getting inside. Last summer, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that NYU’s “researchers in the UAE use caution in broaching topics such as AIDS and prostitution, the status of migrant laborers; Israel and the Holocaust; and domestic politics and corruption.”

Reacting to that, Naomi Schaefer Riley, a Wall Street Journal education writer, penned a piece in The New York Post accusing NYU and other American colleges of “pandering to despots.” The Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff picked up her theme and accused NYU’s Mr. Sexton of “despoiling” NYU’s reputation.

NYU professor Andrew Ross, head of the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told The Observer that the faculty plans a vote of no confidence on Mr. Sexton next month, and the Abu Dhabi issue is one reason for it.  “The decision to invest so much of NYU’ reputation in Abu Dhabi was made unilaterally by President John Sexton, and it is one of the factors weighing on the faculty’s desire to pursue a vote of no confidence in him,” he said.

Still, hundreds of NYU’s faculty members have volunteered to work in Abu Dhabi anyway. And why not? Who could resist the lure of large bonuses—in some cases the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s salary—first-class airfare for family and free private school for the kids?

NYUAD aims to have 2,200 undergraduates within the next 10 years. Currently the school has 450 students who pay $65,300 per year, much of it underwritten by UAE financial aid.

While NYUAD has been open for business on Happiness Island since 2010, the Louvre’s opening has been delayed to 2015, and the $800 million deal to bring the Guggenheim there is also stalled, until at least 2017. Frank Gehry’s 90,000-square-foot design, looking every bit like a crazy pile of discarded origami bits, remains a model only. Not a spade of desert sand has been overturned.

Last year, artists and curators signed an online petition threatening to boycott the Goog over the treatment of workers in Abu Dhabi. “Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers,” Walid Raad, a Lebanese-born New York artist who was one of the boycott’s organizers, said in a statement. “Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same kind of respect as those working with cameras and brushes.”

But abused laborers aren’t the only obstacle to a happy marriage between the Goog and the emir. In a Guardian piece last year about the stalled plans, a museum official said the delay provides time to “educate the audience,” in case the art might provoke an “aggressive response” from conservative Emiratis. William Wells, director of the Townhouse gallery in Cairo, told the Guardian that the Guggenheim did not have a signed commitment from Abu Dhabi that there would be no censorship, although the project managers told the paper there was an understanding. Eleanor R. Goodbar, a Guggenheim foundation spokesman, told The Observer that terms of the agreement were confidential.

Last September, independent auditors looking at worker conditions at Happiness Island found that three-quarters of the site’s workers had paid recruitment fees for their jobs, a form of indentured servitude banned under international labor standards.

There is a very good argument to be made for liberal institutions putting down stakes in repressive regimes. They can serve as good bacilli of sorts, implanting ideals of tolerance, women’s rights and free speech in the belly of the beast. But there is no evidence that NYU or the Guggenheim ever insisted on anything like a free speech or women’s rights clause when they sold their brands.

We have (cynically) come to expect American corporations to remain silent on human rights abuses as one dirty cost of global capitalism. When these institutions, desperate for cash in recessionary times, take money (and first-class plane tickets) to expand the global brand without retaining the meaning of the brand, they aren’t much different from Shell, BP or anyone else doing business in the Gulf.

If our strongholds of tolerance and free and open discourse don’t maintain standards vital to our society and to their own enterprises, they are merely selling their souls, and by extension, ours.

editorial@observer.com

If Mr. Bloomberg was prepped for such a question, it showed. NYU, the mayor quickly noted, planned to spend $60 million of its own money to move Transit Authority equipment and city personnel out of the building it intends to occupy. “We should be saying thank you to them,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Truth be told, NYU doesn’t need public expressions of gratitude. All it needs is the city’s continued commitment to a bold and visionary plan to transform parts of the city into a veritable hothouse of high-tech research. NYU’s plans for downtown Brooklyn are part of a larger blueprint designed to attract world-class scientists and engineers to New York City, allowing it to compete with Silicon Valley and other research centers around the country.

In partnership with the City University of New York, the Indian Institute of Technology, the University of Toronto, Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Warwick, NYU will transform the former headquarters of the Transit Authority into a state-of-the-art campus that will attract cutting-edge faculty and top-flight students. The building is virtually vacant—few transit employees actually work in the building. The Police Department occupies some space, but NYU will pay for the NYPD’s relocation costs as well as the Transit Authority’s.

In return, the school will get the building and about $15 million in tax breaks and other savings for a dollar a year. Renovation of the building, expected to take several years, will create about 2,000 construction jobs, according to the mayor. The city estimates that the project will generate about $5.5 billion in economic activity during its first 30 years. Tax revenues over that same period will be about $597 million, according to the city.

That alone would make the project more than worthwhile. But it’s important to remember that the NYU initiative is part of a larger vision for the city’s 21^st-century economy. Months ago, the mayor announced that Cornell University and Israel-based Technion won a bid to construct a $2 billion engineering school on Roosevelt Island. That project attracted bidders from around the world, ratifying the mayor’s contention that the city could attract global leaders in the sciences to New York.

The NYU-led project in downtown Brooklyn will help spread the benefits of the city’s knowledge economy, and, just as important, will enchance the city’s new-found reputation as an inculcator of high-tech research and development.

Is that someone wearing a purple shirt in the window? (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Buzz on the street about New York University's latest purchase turns out to be false!

If big purple already didn't own most of Manhattan, it wasn't much a shock to have learned from Gothamist that the school/corporation bought Cooper Union yesterday morning. A press release from a @cooper.edu rolled int Gothamist's inbox and linked to "letter from the president":

Beginning in academic year 2015, The Cooper Union will lease its recently completed New Academic Building at 41 Cooper Square to NYU-Poly to ensure $20 million in new revenue annually by 2018, putting our institution on a sustainable path for the future while maintaining reverence for its past.

The 41 Cooper Square building has been, for the community, a reminder of past ill-planning and fiduciary neglect. We have, and must continue, to live within the means provided to us in order to preserve Peter Cooper's innovative social mission. We shall not falter in this regard.

The website featured near identical design features to Cooper Union's official website which made it very convincing. It was also in light of Cooper Union's recent cash strap, which mixed with a little NYU-omnipresence, the press release sounded nearly divine. (Full disclosure: The Observer nearly fell for the gag, too, but we were too busy with other stories yesterday to do anything with it.)

Cooper Union was quick to react, of course, and released a statement to Gothamist saying that the information is false. Gothamist apologized and exchanged emails with the person who sent the press release and it turned out to be a junior at Cooper Union addressing dire issues at the school:

As a current Junior and Student Council President in The Cooper Union School of Art, I am guaranteed the incredible gift of a full-tuition scholarship. This protest is meant to help preserve that gift for future generations of students. The question has become: what do we consider more expendable, a 110-year tradition dedicated to the value of tuition-free, merit-based education, or a three year old trophy building that is partially responsible for the Institution's current fiscal turmoil?

[...]

In this context, it is more important than ever to advocate for Cooper Union's ethos-- without discrimination based on one's ability to pay, but on the merit of hard work and dedication-- that education should be as free as air and water.

How noble!

Though NYU's purchasing power is used to joke about more than cash-poor schools. Just two years ago, NYU's newspaper ran an April Fool's prank article about the school's purchase of Columbia University. There's also word on the street that NYU bought Polytechnic University across the river back in 2008, but those details remain indiscernible...

mewing@observer.comG

Franco.

José Angel Santana, a theater professor at New York University, tells The New York Post that he got fired for giving James Franco a 'D' in a class called "Directing the Actor II." Mr. Santana is now suing the university, saying that Mr. Franco missed 12 of the 14 classes.

“In my opinion, they’ve turned the NYU graduate film degree into swag for James Franco’s purposes, a possession, something you can buy,” Santana told the Post.

Violet and Pip in happier days.

Today The New York Times reports on the sad fate of Violet the red-tailed hawk, who nested on a window ledge at New York University last spring and raised a chick named Pip. The hawk cam is no longer active, but things have gotten bad for Violet, whose leg was previously infected by a wildlife band that appeared to cut off circulation (the band had been on her leg since 2006). Wildlife experts decided not to take Violet to the vet out of fear of interfering with her relationship to her chick.

Now the condition of the hawk's leg has worsened and Violet faces an uncertain future, alas.

Most #blogstars live in Brooklyn. Obviously.

The media maxim that you haven’t made it until you have a Twitter doppelganger now applies to the stars of New York University campus journalism.

NYU Local, the student-produced news blog founded in 2008, acquired lively fake Twitter and Tumblr accounts this summer.

As far as social media satire goes, Fake NYU Local is less interested in mocking NYU Local than it is in stirring up trouble across campus. While many of the account’s tweets and posts, which began last May, poke fun at the bloggers of NYU Local and the editors of the traditional paper, Washington Square News, Fake NYU Local has become less focused in its attacks, dispensing condescending advice about users’ web presence and information on how to pick up girls.

The Observer spoke with the group behind the account—they claim they’re a group of “artists, philosophers, thinkers, bloggers, journalists, and overall revolutionaries”—over e-mail, where they collectively explained their mission.

“What Fake NYU Local does is cultivate a content center for the world to come to and be enlightened,” they wrote. ”We are surrounded by thousands of haters, and that basically translates into attention on the web.”

Fake NYU Local explained the group began after they were sitting in a room together and “instantly” decided to start the Twitter and Tumblr accounts. When they first began, they mostly teased the real NYU Local in their attempts to be what Fake NYU Local calls “blogstars.”

"Dear FAFSA: stop sending us financial aid emails. Clearly we're #blogstars and don't need "money." How else could we major in #socialmedia?" the group tweeted May 9.

Keyana Stevens, NYU Local editor-in-chief, declined to comment on the account. But in“Top 5 Fictional NYU Accounts on Twitter And Facebook,” Local writer Lauren Walters placed Fake NYU Local at number two, explaining the account was “almost as good as the real thing” because of its jabs at WSN, among other things.

Jaywon Choe, WSN editor-in-chief, could not be reached for comment on the fake account, but it’s no secret in the NYU media community that WSN and the Local have a long-standing rivalry. In this vein, many of the tweets mock WSN.

"We just fell asleep reading this. RT @nyunews: NYU Law School hosts conference to discuss how communities are governedhttp://bit.ly/osdndi," a tweet from Sept. 26 read.

But even the account’s “jabs” at the WSN primarily serve to mock NYU Local’s pretension.

"Dear @nyunews, stop tweeting about @NYUAthletics, they fucking suck and nobody cares. We are real journalism, not your fail of life," the group tweeted Sept. 22.

While the future of Fake NYU Local remains as mysterious as its creators, they're definitely broadening their antics. In light of Occupy Wall Street, Fake NYU Local even began a similar—and completely mocking—movement, calling people to Occupy Stern, NYU’s business school. “For too long, they’ve hidden behind their fancy buildings, corporate presentation rooms, and suited minions,” they said in a blog post.

We can't be sure what's to come for Fake NYU Local, but it's bound to be entertaining.

Ceiling Tile with Female Face, from the Synagogue, Dura-Europos, ca. 245 CE

This Friday, the earliest known images of Christ, from the year 240, go on view in New York for the first time, and they aren’t where you might expect them to be. They are part of a remarkable exhibition at the relatively obscure N.Y.U. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, a jewel-box of a museum on East 84th Street whose mission, according to exhibitions director Dr. Jennifer Chi, is “to break down preconceived notions of antiquity.”

“Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos” does so with a vengeance, in presenting 77 objects from an excavation in Syria that fundamentally altered the understanding of art, culture and religion in the ancient world.

The rediscovery in the 1920s of the abandoned city of Dura-Europos, which had been buried in the desert for 18 long centuries, rewrote history. Some of the excavations were co-sponsored by Yale University, which by agreement with Syria retained some of the finds; the objects in “Edge of Empires” are on loan from Yale.

Art and artifacts of stunning historical importance were uncovered. The paintings of Christ are part of a series of New Testament scenes that exhibition co-curator Dr. Peter De Staebler said are “the earliest dated Christian art in existence.” Narratives painted on the walls of Dura’s large synagogue, considered the best-preserved in the world, revealed a Jewish figural tradition that had been totally unknown—that had, in fact, been thought to be nonexistent. The rediscovery of these painted Bible stories—among them, Moses and the Burning Bush, the Sacrifice of Isaac and the Exodus from Egypt with the astounding representation of the hands of God (on display by photo and slideshow; the originals are in Damascus)—sparked a revolution in thinking about art and Jewish religious practice.

The finds at Dura also unexpectedly demonstrated that, far from being modern developments, religious coexistence and multiculturalism were thriving a couple of millennia ago on the outskirts of the Roman Empire.

The New Testament scenes were found in what is believed to be the oldest-known baptistery, which was part of a Christian “house-church” (a house that was used as a church). Dura’s house-church is considered the oldest such structure ever revealed. The Institute is showing three of the baptistery’s original wall paintings. From the city’s synagogue come 10 ceiling tiles, each elaborately painted with astrological signs, pine cones, fruit and faces; they’re being shown together for the first time. Then there are the various beliefs lumped together under the rubric “pagan,” and numerous structures were found in Dura dedicated to Greek, Roman and local gods. Some of the pagan imagery seen at the Institute is itself a blend of different pagan strains.

Not only did Christians, Jews and pagans worship side by side—the Temple of Aphrodite was located across the street from the synagogue—but the city was also inhabited by distinct populations of Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Persians. And they all apparently coexisted in harmony.

“That’s what’s so extraordinary,” said Dr. Chi. The discoveries to be made at this show are legion, but perhaps the most compelling is the fact that it presents objects of major religions and diverse populations that date from the same century and were excavated from the same site, indicating that all those groups apparently lived together peacefully.

Excavators even found a ring in the ruins, also now on display, engraved with the Greek word “omonoia,” meaning “harmony” or “concord.” The concept referred to agreements between individuals or political entities, and, according to Dr. Chi, it also referred to a melding of cultures. (Some scholars think it’s an engagement ring.) The art, artifacts and writings found at Dura spat in the eye of those establishment scholars who over the centuries assumed inherent hostility among religions and cultures.

And there was plenty else that caused people to sit up. The Christian narratives were created before the religion was state-authorized by the Roman Emperor Constantine—i.e., before the persecution of Christians was lifted—and before any institutional Church had even decided what the narrative components of the religion were. The Jewish narratives were created before rabbis reinterpreted, about a thousand years later, what “graven images” meant.

Founded by the Greeks, Dura prospered under the Romans until 256, when it was sacked by what more recently might be called Persian armies. Everything in the exhibit is from the Roman period. According to Dr. De Staebler, Dura had a population of around 10,000. But after it was sacked, the city was virtually abandoned. It remained unknown and unexplored for 18 centuries until accidentally rediscovered in 1920 by British troops. Because the area is so dry, Dr. Chi said, the objects are in what she calls “a remarkable state of preservation.”

Situated above the Euphrates River and at the intersection of international trade routes in the region, Dura thrived as both a military garrison and an important way-station for merchant caravans traveling to and from the Mediterranean and Arabian seas. The excavations, begun in the 1920s, uncovered “a multilayered society,” said Dr. Chi. Some of that complex layering can be seen in the concurrent use of the many languages that attest to Dura’s international character—Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Parthian, Persian, Hebrew and numerous dialects from as far away as North Arabia were found, sometimes in an unexpected hodgepodge. Inscriptions on the city gates were bilingual. A donor’s name on one synagogue tile is in Aramaic, and on another tile the same name is in Greek.

This cosmopolitan city’s cultural and social fabric is briefly explored with a portrait of a Roman actuary, objects of daily life like a child’s leather shoe, locally produced green-glazed pottery, plates and bowls imported from Tunisia and the Aegean coast and military artifacts like bronze horse armor. A painted wood and rawhide shield decorated with a Roman imperial eagle at the top and a lion at the bottom is considered the best preserved of its kind.

The exhibition also features an interactive display that shows the buildings found at Dura and some of their floor plans and photographs from the initial excavations in the 1920s and 1930s.

The display is clarifying, but museum-goers may be both flummoxed and delighted by what they find at the five-year- old Institute, which puts on two exhibitions a year. At most museums, curators almost invariably display ancient art as either Egyptian, or Greek, or Roman. Each culture’s objects are arranged separately and chronologically to demonstrate a supposed stylistic development. Go across the street to the Metropolitan Museum and you’ll see a superb example of how the ancient world is conventionally organized

N.Y.U.’s Institute presents what Dr. Chi calls “alternative viewpoints of ancient culture.”  Its faculty, composed of historians, archaeologists, epigraphers, art historians and others, is, she said, “not restricted by departmental disciplines,” just as the exhibitions are not forced into a conventional intellectual straightjacket. In contrast to usual museum practice, here aesthetic value is only one consideration in deciding what to show and, she said, “it’s not what you look at first.”

The Christian wall paintings may seem crude, for example, especially when compared with some of the pagan imagery whose forms had been developed by artists over centuries. But consider the mere fact that miracles are being represented—one shows Jesus and Peter walking on water, another the Healing of the Paralytic—at a time when Christian iconography was scarcely in existence and gospel had not yet been separated from apocrypha. These paintings, part of a programmatic series of scenes about salvation, may be the earliest manifestation of the visual church.

“We are not about the greatest hits,” said Dr. Chi, “but about finding a balance between art and context.”

editorial@observer.com

Brodsky gave up his seat to run, unsuccessfully for attorney general last year. The notably anti-Albany sentiment on the campaign trail made his bid particularly challenging. But the fact that he lands a job outside any government office and fancy lobbying firm means his tendency to speak bluntly, will, probably, not be diminished.

The official release:

Brodsky will work on developing courses and symposia on a variety of public issues, including governance reform of private and public institutions, national and international capital movement between the private and public sector, and other matters reflecting his long experience in government.

 

In addition, he will work cooperatively with other disciplines and elements of the University community, and write and speak on issues of public importance within and outside NYU. Much of his efforts will focus on the important but under-developed connections between government and other sectors. He also will teach, and has begun to do so this semester, co-teaching a graduate class on Public Policy and The Arts.

"I am delighted that Richard Brodsky has agreed to join us as Senior Fellow," said Ellen Schall, Dean of NYU Wagner. "Richard brings enormous experience in the workings of state and local government, a keen understanding of what it takes to bring about change, and, not least, unmatched enthusiasm."

Brodsky was a Member of the New York State Assembly from 1982 to 2010, and is a graduate of Brandeis University and Harvard Law School.

"NYU Wagner, as part of a global network university, has a critically important role in educating leaders for public service," he said. "Now, more than ever, we need individuals of the highest caliber, integrity, and training to devote their careers to public life and the public good. I'm delighted to work with the outstanding faculty, administration and student body at one of the world's great universities. My thanks to Dean Schall and the leadership of NYU."

At noon sharp, in the rectory next door, the Rev. Raymond Rafferty, the church's pastor, leaned forward, checked his watch and told The Observer gently, "Now, I really have to go." He had to prepare for the 12:10 Mass. The church holds services at least once daily during the week, and four times on Sunday. But the nave, which holds 400 people, is rarely full.

Once, Corpus Christi would have towered over the neighboring apartment buildings. But now it sits literally in the shadows of Columbia's Teachers' College across 121st Street, yet another totem of the university's swallowing of its upper Manhattan neighborhood.

Columbia, in fact, owns every building on both sides of the street, save for one co-op and the church. And several blocks to the northwest, the university is undertaking a massive 17-acre expansion into West Harlem that will inevitably mean years of demolitions and noisy construction. When it's finished, Columbia will have transformed an area once filled with auto mechanics and small manufacturers into a modern day "piazza," as its architect, the Italian Renzo Piano, describes it.

SLIDESHOW: E=MC Awesome: An Exclusive Look at Columbia's New Manhattanville Science Center

According to the most recent tax assessment rolls, provided by the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance and analyzed by The Observer, Columbia and N.Y.U. have amassed valuable properties rivaling the Catholic Church's long-held portfolio. The market value of city property owned by each of the three institutions appears to hover around $1.5 billion, based on the assessment rolls. The Catholic Church still claims a slight lead, but N.Y.U. and Columbia trail by only a couple of hundred million dollars each, and will almost certainly eclipse the church soon.

Though exact numbers are impossible to attain (the universities and the church own numerous properties under different registered names, and there are in total more than 11,000 registered property owners in the city), they clearly show that the gap has narrowed. Moreover, given the downward trends for membership in major religious organizations in the United States, time is on the universities' side.

New York City, which even a decade ago boasted a strong (and strongly religious) manufacturing working class, has rapidly become a wonkhub of nearly 600,000 post-high school students, according to the last census. The academic expansion in the city has come at the same time that the Catholic Church-once New York's largest private landlord and community presence-has confronted decline. In neighborhoods like Father Rafferty's, the role reversal is startling, with colleges starting to elbow out the church for space and influence. "New York is an intellectual city," said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University (and an Observer contributor). "People want to study in New York. You have to recognize how much this has really changed."

While the Catholic Church, like other major religious organizations, struggles with declining resources and attendance, universities are scrambling to find room to grow. Father Rafferty, who before Corpus Christi was a New York University chaplain for almost a decade, smiles kindly when he talks about Columbia's reign over the neighborhood. "I understand the need for expansion," he said. "But you also need to think about the community you're expanding into."

He does not blame the university for any decline in church membership. "It's not their direct intention to cause that," Father Rafferty said. "Some of this is driven by society changing, and the failure of churches to evangelize, welcome newcomers, and scandals within the church."

For decades, Corpus Christi has, in fact, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with its Ivy League neighbor. While a student at Columbia in the 1930s, for instance, Thomas Merton, later to become one of the 20th century's most famous Catholics as an author and lecturer, was baptized there, and young people still approach Father Rafferty asking to be christened after reading Merton's memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain. But starting in the '60s and '70s, partly because of its neighbor's growing population of students and faculty, Corpus Christi watched its membership drop (though it has climbed slightly in the past decade). Apartment buildings once filled with strongly Catholic Irish and Hispanic immigrants have become housing for undergrads and their TAs, who may or may not see the need for Catholic theology or organized religion in general.

The church still controls some of the city's most valuable real estate. Amid the anxious consumerism of Fifth Avenue, St. Patrick's Cathedral rises largely unchanged over the past 150 years. When the church bought this land in 1810, in what was then the countrified city limits, "People thought it was a folly," said Paul Moses, a journalism professor at Brooklyn College, who's reported on the Catholic Church for decades. But the church's understanding of demographics, its insight into the rhythms of birth, marriage and death in New York, was unmatched. The cathedral cost about $4 million to build, and now St. Patrick's, which is also the seat of the archbishop of New York, has more than $191 million in assets, making it one of the 150 biggest landowners on the city's assessment rolls.    

But even as the value of St. Patrick's and other church properties has skyrocketed, many other Catholic parishes are in dire financial straits. "The church is land-rich and cash-poor," said one person familiar with its holdings. "There is no question many of the properties are an economic drain." Many of the buildings should be demolished, the source added, but a lot still enjoy "prime, prime locations."

Though baptized Catholics still make up roughly 40 percent of the New York City population, according to researchers, church attendance is down locally 20 percent over the past decade (a challenge faced by many other mainstream Christian denominations), and the church has also faced diminishing enrollment in parochial schools. The archdiocese of New York, which includes Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island as well as several upstate counties, announced in 2007 that it would close two parishes and merge six with others-although a spokesman noted that the situation is ongoing and all are being used as worship sites.

The archdiocese also recently announced that 27 of 185 schools will close this year-the biggest reorganization in its history-including five schools that will close or merge in Manhattan. Since the closing of St. Vincent's in early 2010, no Catholic hospitals are left in any of the five boroughs.
"Within the church," Mr. Moses said, "there's a real effort being made to use real estate as an asset. They're facing such financial difficulties, and [real estate] will help them develop a solid financial base."

The decisions can be heartbreaking, and sometimes deeply divisive. Closing a school or church is "like a death," said Timothy King, a real estate agent at CPEX Realty, who has helped the church manage some of its assets. "The cardinal and bishop give a lot of prayerful consideration to all of these matters," he said, "to have an outcome that's going to assure the long-term benefit for everyone."

On Sunday, The Brooklyn Paper reported that the Brooklyn diocese, which includes Queens as well, called in three squad cars to oversee the last Mass at Our Lady of Montserrat in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was closed, as scheduled, a day later. Its pastor, the Rev. Jim O'Shea, had vocally opposed the closing, backed by a number of parishioners. "It's a complete shame that instead of making an appearance and thanking the community, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio sent the police in fear that people would protest because they know the truth behind the closure is political," one worshiper told The Paper.

Meanwhile, Bishop DiMarzio put out a statement saying he was "deeply aware of the sacrifice that these changes mean for those who worship in these churches."
Even after closing parishes or schools, the church usually chooses to hold on to its assets, sometimes leasing them to other institutions such as charter schools. The demographics could still change, and the church has also perhaps learned from the tragic example of St. Vincent's Hospital, a Village institution run by the Sisters of Charity that the church sold off ward by ward until it was forced to close the entire hospital. A plan by the hospital and developer Rudin Management to build condos that would help support St. Vincent's buckled under community opposition.

As the case of St. Vincent's illustrates, finding new uses for the buildings is also not easy: What good is a church as anything other than a church? "Unless at some point we're in need of a leper colony, prison or mental asylum," a source said, the buildings are "functionally obsolete."

The church's decline affects us all. For nearly a century, religious institutions stood between many New Yorkers and desperation. "The church was extremely important in helping in the rebuilding of New York City," said former mayor Ed Koch, who recognized early on in his political career the importance of reaching out to Catholic voters, especially the so-called white ethnic ones in the outer boroughs. "And it remains extremely important in delivering services. The Catholic Church is No. 1 in the delivery of social services, better than what the civil service can do."  

As N.Y.U. and Columbia rise to dominance, will their presence be as benign?

The universities have both embarked on their biggest expansion plans in over 100 years, and their respective neighborhoods' opposition has been closely chronicled. N.Y.U plans to grow its campus by more than 40 percent, adding 3 million-plus square feet in Greenwich Village, an engineering school in Brooklyn and a satellite campus on Governors Island. The main campus of the school-at more than 22,000 undergraduates, the largest private college in the U.S.-is already situated in one of the most densely populated areas of the city.
Stone churches once rose a couple of stories above their neighbors; N.Y.U. plans to build space equaling the Empire State Building in Greenwich Village, which critics say will dwarf its surroundings.

Columbia has also announced a $6.3 billion expansion plan that will add 6.8 million square feet of additional classrooms and other facilities, including the 17-acre West Harlem campus. The new campus will almost certainly drive up property values and make it more difficult for members of the working-class neighborhood to continue living there. Some clergy have raised objections that the plans do not include affordable housing on the site of the campus.

Even as Columbia grows and the church's influence wanes, it is hardly a neatly plotted story of the university triumphing at the expense of the church. It's more like two stories running parallel in the same setting. Columbia even met with local clergy when beginning its expansion efforts nearly a decade ago, but it did not go well: Some clergy stopped attending. "The situation has been compared to David and Goliath," said the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp of St. Mary's Episcopal Church on 126th Street and Amsterdam. "All David had to do was take Goliath off the field. ... How do you get Goliath to sit down, make peace and be a good neighbor?"

New Yorkers will have to make peace with the new Goliaths rising in their midst. Universities and colleges already control more than 22 percent of office space in New York City, according to Cassidy Turley, including 72 million square feet in Manhattan. Columbia's holdings totaled 19.6 million square feet, and N.Y.U. owns 15 million feet, according to the report. "These universities have become powerhouses financially," Mr. Moses, the journalism professor at Brooklyn College, said. "The churches don't seem to command that kind of influence. They're begging foundations to keep their schools alive.

"You are talking about money," he added. "Universities have lots of money and the churches don't."

The question remains: Can universities step in to fill the gap left by a declining church, providing education, hospitals and a sense of community, given the relentless hustle in this city?

"Universities help add to the city's quality of life," Mr. Moss, of N.Y.U., said. "Within the university, you have seminars, theater groups, lectures. They become an important part of the city's fabric."

Much like the role the Catholic Church once filled? "Yes, exactly like that."

But when The Observer floated the same idea to the Rev. Thomas Shelley, a professor of Catholic history at Fordham, he laughed gently. "The main business of the church is religion," he said. "Universities don't do that and aren't expected to do it."  

lkusisto@observer.com

The sale hit public records yesterday evening, and will give the school a commercial condo in Toll Brothers' glassy new apartment building at 303 East 33rd Street, which enjoys both the distinction of being the area's first green building and the developer's least controversial one. The seller is KTL 303 LLC, an affiliate of Toll Brothers and Kibel Companies.

This marks New York University's second high-priced commercial condo purchase since the kiddies came back to school this fall, when the university proper also dropped $10 million on a condo in the Silk Building, at 14 East 4th Street.

The medical center also recently leased more space for a new women's medical center further uptown.

It's not the Financial District, but this should still make at least a few Village residents happy. Earlier this year, NYU dropped $65 million on the Forbes building at 60-62 Fifth Avenue and bought Founders Hall, a 26-story dorm for for $134 million, boosting its saturation of the neighborhood.

It will soon seek approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission for a 400-foot tower at the I.M. Pei Silver Towers complex, as well as other development on the so-called super blocks, a move that has incensed neighbors even more than usual.

Whether this new purchase helps alleviate pressure on NYU's "core" campus or is simply another piece of its growing medical empire is unclear--representatives for the university and Toll Brothers were not immediately available for comment.

UPDATE: A spokeswoman for NYU Langone contacted us Thursday and it's the latter. NYU Langone Medical Center purchased the commercial condominium to house its Department of Plastic Surgery and the Institute of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

lkusisto@observer.com